I was born in 1953 and by the time I left home twenty years later I had lived in five different houses.

I was lucky my parents moved to Yorkshire shortly before I was born – if they had left it much later I would have been born in Lancashire. They moved to Leeds and rented a house in the same street as my dad’s parents.

Stipendiary Street

We lived in the Burmantofts area of the city in a small back-to-back terrace house, number 26 Stipendiary Street. There was one room and a kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. There was no bathroom or indoor toilet. In the photograph our house was number 26 – the house on the very right of the picture.

Just next to the house is a small gate which leads to a shared toilet. I was too young to really remember this house but my mum tells me that there were two toilets in the small yard. Each toilet was used by two homes.

Stipendiary Street is no longer there. The area was cleared and some high rise local authority flats (apartments) were built in place of the terraced houses.

Sometime around late 1957 or early 1958 we moved closer to the city centre. My dad became manager of the Wellington Inn public house on Wellington Road. We lived here for about 18 months. My brother was born in the pub in November 1958. Rumour has it that at the tender age of five or six I used to sneak behind the bar and steal bottles of Babycham. Sadly the pub was demolished during the time when Leeds was undergoing major redevelopment and the building was in the way of a new road layout.

Dickens Street

We left the pub and moved about a mile up the road to the suburb of Wortley. Number 8 Dickens Street was another back-to-back terrace house. There was one room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs and no bathroom. Again the toilet facilities were down the street. My mum says that she didn’t like living in this house at all – in fact I would probably say she hated it. So this was only ever going to be a temporary stop along the way. Dickens Street and the surrounding area was flattened by the bulldozers and new homes were built there.

Roseneath Place

Around 1961 / 1962 we moved to 13 Roseneath Place – probably about another mile away and still in Wortley. This house was a bit bigger – still a back-to-back terrace and the toilet was still down the street – but we had further to walk this time. The house had one room and a kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. But we also had a cellar and a large attic room. We lived here until the summer of 1965. As with all the previous homes this one was also demolished for a new housing development.

Our next house was 39 Benson Gardens in the suburb of Wortley. This was the first house my parents bought, all the previous ones were rented. Things were looking up for us by now and we had an indoor toilet and bathroom. There was one room and a large kitchen downstairs and three bedrooms. We also had gardens to the front and back of the house. We also got our first telephone and car while living here.

I left home in 1973 and moved to Bradford about nine miles from Leeds.

My parents moved house again in 1980. They bought a semi-detached home in Wortley and settled down at last. My mother still lives in the house and my brother and sister also live in the same suburb with their families.

I moved back to Leeds in 1992 and live in another suburb about four miles from the rest of the family.